People are constantly losing money and hurting the environment because of the silly things that they do with some of their common household items.

People don’t realize how much they waste our earth’s resources every day. It’s actually really serious. With a bit of knowledge though I think many people can correct their sloppy habits and turn them into good ones.

Paper

Every piece of paper has two blank sides, yet most of us only use one. If we make an error on a page then our reaction is to just throw out the paper without even thinking of erasing the blemishes or using the other side. We use too much paper to make handouts for a large group of people when we could just hand one copy around for everyone to see. We can also recycle paper or use the scraps for alternative uses. Most people disregard recycling paper entirely and just throw out every piece of scrap paper they ever use. If you think about it, almost everyone uses at least one piece of paper every day. If half of the entire population recycled one piece of paper every day, that would make about 900 billion sheets of recycled paper that could be reused.

Water

Water is the main source of life on earth. We need it every day and we use it for so many different reasons. Water naturally goes through a cycle that brings itself back, but much of it comes back into the ocean turning it into salt water. There is a small percentage of it that also gets turned into acid rain or gets polluted. Many places on earth don’t have any fresh water that is available because it is contaminated with deadly bacteria. Places where good, fresh water is available are the places where the people need to be more considering of the people who are less fortunate. We use way too much excess water when we clean our dishes and wash our hands as well as when we take showers or baths. We really don’t take into account how much water we really are wasting. It costs a lot of money to desalinize or decontaminate water to turn it into fresh water. This is what many countries need to do to make their water drinkable but they just don’t have the money to do it. If we could save more of our fresh water, we could bottle some of it and ship it out to the people who really need it.

Fossil Fuels

The world we have made for ourselves pretty much wouldn’t be able to run without fossil fuels. We have made ourselves completely reliant on burning oils, gases, and coal for most of our earths energy. There are many natural sources of energy that we don’t even think to take advantage of, such as wind, solar, and hydro power. We can do so many things to cut down on the use of fossil fuels, but it will definitely take time and money. The big reason that we don’t want to make the change to using natural sources of power is because universal change costs a whole lot of MONEY. If money wasn’t a factor than I’m sure people would be thrilled to make the change, but any giant universal change such as this would put countries in big debt. It costs money to build wind turbines, solar panels, and hydro turbines. And then you have to pay people to install them. I think that everyone should look at the bigger picture and really think about what we are doing to our environment by burning all of these fossil fuels. I think that the time for a big change is now before we dig ourselves into too deep a hole.